When I drive my kids to school, we go through Salem, Massachusetts, once a place where heresy and witchcraft were horribly punished, now a place where eccentricity and wackiness of all sorts are not only tolerated, but gleefully promoted. Salem is especially weird around Halloween, but almost every day I spot some new character who appears to have stepped right out of some hyper-post-modern-surrealist novella. I like making up stories about these people–perhaps someday I will write the Great American Hyper-Post-Modern-Surrealist Novel.
But Salem is also a tough town. Part of the reason it markets its wackiness is that tourism is now virtually the only industry in a once-thriving city. Salem was a truly down and out city in the 70s, and had horrible drug problems in the 80s and early 90s. Things are some better now, but there are still a lot of sad people, living precariously on the thin line between survival and disastrous poverty. In among the colorful women with long hair and flowing capes, the men dressed in pirate costumes in the middle of the day in April (possibly, but not reliably, on their way to work at the Pirate Museum), I catch glimpses of the other face of Salem. A woman probably my own age, her face creased by hardships I can barely imagine, grimly smoking a cigarette while she waits for the school bus with her young daughter; a thin boy, maybe 13 or 14, trying to swagger across a slushy January street in basketball shoes with one sole falling off; an ancient woman shuffling along, barely able to walk while pushing her rickety shopping cart, but with her hair still dyed raven black, falling in precisely bobby-pinned waves around her temples; a middle-aged mother, walking fast, trying to keep up with her annoyed-looking, ponytailed, Doc-Martened teenage son, who is talking to her, but not looking back at her and not slowing his pace to walk next to her. She looks pinched and frightened, but somehow also fierce and protective.
This pair haunts me, makes me wonder about the mothers of all of those other people whose faces grab my attention. It is startling, somehow, to think that all of these people have mothers, that they were once babies, round and needy. Someone fed them, dressed them, bathed and cared for them. They were loved, however imperfectly, by women who stared at their sleeping forms, and smiled in the dark. No mother dreams of her baby boy, grown sullen and rude, walking down the street ahead of her; no mother hopes to send her gawky teen out in shoes that are falling apart; no woman imagines her daughter’s face so unutterably tired, forlornly looking down the street for the bus; parents don’t think of their babies suffering the indignities of aging. I think this must be what it means to be fallen from grace– we are all so far from our mothers’ arms.
But we remember sometimes, when the moon is bright. And, stirring in our sleep sometimes, we may see Mother’s or Father’s face, smiling in the doorway.
April 10, 2005 at 7:08 pm
Beautiful
April 10, 2005 at 7:17 pm
KHH for Poet of the Bloggernacle (or Writer-in-Residence) or something.
April 10, 2005 at 10:01 pm
I’m so glad to see you writing again. I had wondered if you’d abandoned us.
Thank you for that.
April 10, 2005 at 10:37 pm
Welcome back Kristine! Bloggernacle Poetess Laureate is what I think Ronan is looking for.
Is there something with the Kris-es that makes people become terrifically fantastic writers? ‘Cause I’m thinking about a name change.
April 10, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Too much… It’s not even Mother’s Day and I’ve got to call my Mom now.
April 11, 2005 at 12:56 am
Thanks Kristine, this is lovely.
I too, when seeing weathered aged faces, imagine my feeling were that child mine, or the feeling of my mother, were the weathered face mine.
Though the virtue of imagining transposed faces on our suffering brothers and sisters is to effect and shape and cultivate our empathy and moral response, I wonder, however, if projecting the bonds of our dearest relationships onto strangers is fair. For isn’t it possible (is it not? am I being melodramatic?) that the woman with the weathered face was never cherished — was never suffocatingly embraced by someone squeezing as though to transfer love from heart to heart — even by her mother? This possibility evokes different emotions than seeing in her face my daughter, it’s worse. On one hand it is the worst possible scenario: her darkness lacks even the faint glimmer of distant memories of adoring smiles from the doorway. On the other hand her plight may be infinitely bleak: she might be completely and utterly empty — so empty she doesn’t know there’s any part of her that isn’t hole — and have lived a life without ever being alive. (Only love makes us alive.)
Or maybe I just imagine the possibility of the woman’s never having been loved to spare me the agony of picturing my daughter in her place. I want to believe I’ve loved and squeezed my girls so hard and so often that they’re forever shielded from from genuine despair.
April 11, 2005 at 8:58 am
Matt–you’re right, of course, that I’m guilty of sentimentalizing things I don’t understand. Possibly it’s a cheap rhetorical trick to play on emotions, mine and others.’ On the other hand, I do think more babies are loved than not–I’ve seen some pretty unlikely women manage to break through the haze of their own problems to mother tenderly and attentively, at least on occasion. Also, I think that even for people who were very, very poorly loved by their parents, the idea of a loving parent is strongly present, even if only as a perceived lack–the shape of that hole is known and felt, even if it is only a hole. And, though I can’t prove it, I suspect that our Heavenly Parents peek in on their neglected earthly children rather more often than on those of us who are well cared for.
April 11, 2005 at 10:15 am
Whether these people were loved as children or not, they ought to have been…and how ought they to be treated by us? Kristine has strongly pricked my Christian conscience.
April 11, 2005 at 12:55 pm
Matt’s comment expresses well some of my thoughts upon reading this post.
Although we can hope, we cannot really know whether the souls Kris spied were deeply cherished as babies or not.
I think the poignant thought for me was wondering when, if these souls had indeed been adored as babies (it’s rather easy to love a pink and smiley two year old after all), they had ceased to merit that tender affection. Perhaps those faces are pinched and frightened, haggard and worn because they were never loved. But, more likely, after being cared for, after knowing loving hands and voices, they were no longer easy to love and were no longer favored. Is it harder not to have ever known a mother’s love or after knowing her caresses to be forgotten, abandoned or even betrayed by her?
The thing that troubles me about the post is the message that where a mother is there is grace. The sad truth is that a mother’s love can fail. God tells us that even though a mother can forget her sucking child, He will not forget us.
What does it take for a mother’s love to fail? Hateful words? Adolescent rebellion? Flagrant longterm disrespect? Apostasy? For some mothers these would never turn them from their children. But, for other mothers, it takes far less.
April 11, 2005 at 1:44 pm
Beautiful, Kristine, as always.
April 11, 2005 at 2:11 pm
Kristine Haglund Harris: I think this must be what it means to be fallen from grace– we are all so far from our mothers’ arms.
Yet this is the universal rite of passage. For better or for worse, it’s what makes us into fully formed human beings. The alternative is to become just another tragically early death–someone who died before their imagined prime.
April 11, 2005 at 9:44 pm
Kristine, add me to the list of those who looks forward to reading your beautiful posts.
April 11, 2005 at 10:28 pm
Wow.
April 12, 2005 at 10:27 am
“(it’s rather easy to love a pink and smiley two year old after all)”
HAH! There speaks a woman who does not have a pink and smiley two year old. They are all insomniac sadists! (Says the father deprived of proper sleep last night by his son.)
April 12, 2005 at 11:51 am
Nate, I said they were easy to love not necessarily easy to like :)
April 13, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Is anybody else here surprised by the fact that it doesn’t seem the least bit odd to learn that Nate hates his children?
April 15, 2005 at 7:33 pm
I used to live in a ghetto, and one of the saddest things I saw there (among many) was a pair of 12 year old boys walking down the street, reeking of crack.
The boy who lived next door to us was left home alone on his birthday while his mother spent the afternoon, evening, night at the bar. My 15 year old niece (who came to live with us because her own mother couldn’t take care of her) and her friend kept him company so he wouldn’t have to spend his birthday alone.